Changes: coverage of astro-ph preprints in INSPIRE

The Astronomy, Astrophysics and HEP communities have long relied on arXiv, ADS and INSPIRE for their communication. ADS has been tailored to the needs of the Astronomy and Astrophysics communities, and INSPIRE emerges from the HEP community. All three communities use arXiv to distribute preprints.

INSPIRE currently lists all astro-ph preprints appearing in arXiv. However, most of them are not immediately relevant to the HEP community and we do not provide additional services such as author disambiguation, affiliations, reference curation, conference information, etc. for these preprints.

Starting on the 1st of October, INSPIRE will only add a relevant subset of astro-ph:

astro-ph.HE [High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena] in its entirety, including cross-listings

We will also take care to cover articles on dark matter and dark energy, as well as articles by the Planck Collaboration. Other articles relevant to HEP will be added on a case-by-case basis. For example, in the astro-ph.CO category [Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics], roughly 50% of the publications are HEP-related and will be added to INSPIRE.

We hope this will make it easier for users to find relevant content. Our friends at ADS will continue to be the natural port of call for those users who need a deeper analysis of Astronomy and Astrophysics content, and we are working behind the scenes to better integrate the services of our two systems.

4 Thoughts on “Changes: coverage of astro-ph preprints in INSPIRE”

I think this is really not a good idea (mildly phrased)! I have used spires for al my scientific live (which is a couple of decades by now) and I am working in both fields (cosmology and particle physics). If you are not tracking all the papers anymore that come to astro-ph, it will make it very difficult for me to do my literature search on spires. This is hugely disappointing. I urge you to reconsider this and at least track all the papers on astro-ph.CO — who is going to decide what is relevant for HEP and what not? Do we need to stick in key words to the abstract …?

I use InSpire to generate bibtex references,which are much better than the ones from ADS. (and used to use the great bibtex auto-updater before that disappeared in InSpire) Would be great to maintain full astro-ph coverage if only for the bibtex.. Like Katrin. I’m a cosmologist who finds inspire very useful, and sometimes cite astronomy and HEP papers.Antony